After this afternoons session, my sacrifices on the alter of the atomic spheres comes to an end…The number for the day is 35…of 35. An ending and a beginning, even though I am yet to be thru this journey I am embarked upon.
In the news today on the weather front…From NASA
EO News: Atlantic Hurricane Frequency Doubles – July 29, 2007
July 29, 2007FREQUENCY OF ATLANTIC HURRICANES DOUBLED OVER LAST CENTURY; CLIMATE CHANGE SUSPECTED
About twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago, according to a new statistical analysis of hurricanes and tropical storms in the north Atlantic. The study concludes that warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and altered wind patterns associated with global climate change are fueling much of the increase.
The study, by Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology, will be published online July 30 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
“These numbers are a strong indication that climate change is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes,” says Holland.
I am sure we will shortly be told that this release was in error…But the money quote was at the end…
The 2006 hurricane season was far less active than the two preceding years, in part because of the emergence of an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean. However, that year, which was not included in the study, would have ranked above average a century ago, with five hurricanes and four other named storms.
“Even a quiet year by today’s standards would be considered normal or slightly active compared to an average year in the early part of the 20th century,” Holland says.
And so it goes, we are told we can’t trust the conclusions drawn from the data by the very government making the conclusions. More truth and trust issues don’t you think…
Leon Hale speaks of the silence of the lonely country…
The things you hear in the lonely country silence | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle
WINEDALE — On the front porch again at the old country house in Washington County, on a quiet and calm day that’s not as hot as the calendar says it ought to be.It’s midafternoon and the feed-store thermometer hanging on a rusty nail by the front door hasn’t reached 90 degrees yet. So it’s 88 and that’s hot, but it’s nothing against the heat we usually get as we move into August.
No wind again. This entire year of weather, so far, has seemed calm to me. Even when we were having all that rain, we didn’t get a lot of wind with it.
Right now I can’t find a leaf moving in the woods that surround this old house. In what I think of as normal times, the wind produces the predominant noise here in the country. Breezes stirring the trees. Branches scraping on the tin roof. Metal gates popping against their latches.
When those sounds are missing, their places are taken by minor ones I don’t notice on windy days. I can hear the wing clutter of a cardinal out at the bird feeder. The zoom of a hummingbird at the far end of the porch.
I think we have all heard the loudness of a silent day, I know I have. It is loudest when we pay attention to what we don’t hear. I can remember many an afternoon on the front porch of my Grandparent’s small “ranch” in the South Texas brush country. The two hundred acres of brush, cactus, and cultivated fields were just a county or two from the border farms of my Grandfather’s childhood. The still heat of a summer afternoon whiled away on the old church pew there with a glass of iced tea and a good book while Grandpa took his after lunch siesta…The cicadas in the mesquite, the collared lizards basking under the edge of the porch, even the buzzards riding the thermals above all seemed to be awaiting the return of the wind with the afternoons winding down…There was a quietness on those long, hot, dry afternoons that seemed to shout out loud.
When the heat would begin to get the best of me, I’d take myself down to the tank and find that layer of water about three feet under the surface where the temperature seemed to stay 6o° all year round. Our south Texas place had two tanks on it, the larger about a quarter mile from the house through the brush was where I spent many an afternoon staying cool that summer and fall. The year was 1971. Life was good.
A lot of what I am today comes from that summer and fall as I helped move my Grandparents from the upper coast down to the brush country where Grandpa had acquired his dream place for deer hunting. That fall was also my introduction to deer hunting for myself. I followed that family tradition of and on for the next six or seven years before giving up the gun and using a camera to hunt with. I am sure my success rate was terrible. I only remember less than a handful of actual deer put in the freezer. Grandma herself did better, and she hunted from the front window of the ranch house…
Enough for today…Time to go get radiated…
